Knowledge engineering from frontline support to preliminary design

Abstract

The design and maintenance of complex engineering systems such as a jet engine generates a significant amount of documentation. Increasingly, aerospace manufacturers are shifting their focus from selling products to providing services. As a result, when designing new engines, engineers must increasingly consider the life-cycle requirements in addition to design parameters. To identify possible areas of concern, engineers must obtain knowledge gained from the entire life of an engine. However, because of the size and distributed nature of a company's operation, engineers often do not have access to front-line maintenance data. In addition, the large number of documents accrued makes it impossible to examine thoroughly. This paper presents a prototype knowledge-based document repository for such an application. It searches and analyzes distributed document resources, and provides engineers with a summary view of the underlying knowledge. The aim is to aid engineers in creating design requirement documents that incorporate aftermarket issues. Unlike existing document repositories and digital libraries, our approach is knowledge-based, where users browse summary reports instead of following suggested links. To test the validity of our proposed architecture, we have developed and deployed a working prototype. The prototype has been demonstrated to engineers and received positive reviews.

An agile hypertext design methodology

“…This paper is based on our experience over a number of years of producing hypertext/Web applications with short lead times in large industrial and related hypermedia projects, including the mPLAT [24], FREMA [16] and Semantic Web IPAS [22] projects.…”

Navigation Over a Large Ontology for Industrial Web Applications

“…In response to these challenges, we are developing a number of Designer Desktop to harvest and feed back knowledge gained from both previous design and service documents to help (a) engineers design modifications to existing engines, and (b) design engineers in designing the next variant engine, [9,15].…”

“…One might even argue that simplification is not viable as it might remove features that may be required. For example, in the aero-engine component ontology we have previously used for our document repository in Wong et al [9], there are 160 direct subclasses of Part. These 160 classes have a further 1096 direct subclasses.…”

An Information Retrieval System Based on Multiple Portlets

“…Tvarožek,Barla,andBieliková(2007)usedportletstointegratedifferentfunctionalitiesinto asingleuserinterfaceofweb-basedinformationsystems.Theycitedsomeadvantagesofportlets: varioustypesofpresentationofthesamecontentcanbeprovidedtodifferentusers,accesstoportlets canbecontrolledbyuserrolesandaccessprivileges,theusabilityoftheinterfacecanbeimproved andthefunctionalitiescanbeadaptedaccordingtotheneedsandgoalsoftheuser. Bauer,Berleant,Cornell,andBelford(2015) Wong, Crowder, Wills, and Shadbolt (2006) presented a solution for a document repository inaspecificareabasedonmultipleportletsthatcommunicatewitheachother,butitwasbefore JSR-286anditsnewinter-portletcommunicationmechanisms.Althoughtheyusedportletsessions inapplicationscopetopropagatechangesofviewingcontexts,sometimesitisbettertouseportlet eventsorpublicrenderparameters.…”